Point Dume

“I love everything that flows,” Henry Miller once wrote, before turning to a graphic and ultimately misogynist metaphor to drive his point home. Among things that flow we must surely count the writing of Belgian novelist Daphné Tamage (see, notably, her Le retour de Saturne, which we love). By her own account Daphné’s literary sensibility was significantly shaped by Miller, alongside John Fante and other of those mid-century American purveyors of what is sometimes called “dirty realism”. What is it like to commune with these bad boys, or with the ghosts of these bad boys, as a European, as a woman, as the daughter of a supremely gentle father? Why chase after them, after all this time, across all this distance, geographical and temperamental? Let’s let Daphne explain, in this poignant reflection on her recent literary pilgrimage in California, dad perched in the passenger seat like Steinbeck’s own Charley. —The Editors

“One day I’ll be a legend of crustacean mythology” —John Fante, The Road to Los Angeles (1936)

Just before the reelection of T., I dragged my poor father from San Francisco to Los Angeles by way of Carmel, Big Sur, and Cambria. The idea was to drive down Highway 1 over the course of ten days and to tick off all the must-sees. Wanting to spare my father, a beekeeper, the sight of any of that urban violence for which he was constitutionally unprepared, I decided that once we reached LA we would sleep up in the hills of Topanga Canyon. More honestly, my aim was to place myself halfway between Pacific Palisades and Point Dume, where my two unassailable heroes of youth had settled: Henry Miller and John Fante. Heroes? In fact —and in a sense this was worse— they were my models, mentors who would later, through an improbable lineage, give my writing a kind of pre-chewed shape and my drive a direction. I owed a great deal, then, to those two ambivalent, self-absorbed, megalomaniacal, and questionable authors. Men, at that.

When we reached the Point Dume promontory, our bellies distended with clam chowder from Malibu Seafood, my father panicked at the sight of the “Armed Security” signs —black pistols on white backgrounds— planted in every close-cropped lawn along Cliffside Drive.

“Chérichou, I don’t feel very comfortable,” my father said as he slowed down, while I scanned the street for a parking space.

“This isn’t